AS IF

NOVELLA is please to present "AS IF", an exhibition of new work by Abigail Donovan, Troy Richards, Robert Straight and Peter Williams.

Abigail Donovan is interested in constructing instruments of observation, particularly mechanisms that might open up the space in light. What is moving? What is not? How do we reflect the relative motion of existence? Is time a condition of objects + humans or one or the other? Included in AS IF is the apparatus For Ibn al-Haytham: Considerations Relating to Shapes of Equilibrium, which was built in collaboration with physicist Tom Hughes.

Donovan’s artist collective the 181 has had exhibitions and performances at a range of international venues, including most recently: The National Centre for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia; Galleria Artra, Milan, Italy; STOFF, Stockholm, Sweden; SPACE Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA; High Desert Test Sites 2013, Joshua Tree, CA; and Slingshot 2014, Athens, GA.

Troy Richards works in a variety of media, exploring ideas of accumulation, instability, and uncertainty as they relate to temporality. Richards’s works are generated through a combination of digital and analog means, engaging and revealing the artist’s hand through otherwise indirect processes. For the two pieces included in the exhibition, Crash (Orpheus) and Maenad (Lohan), the 4-color (CMYK) printing process is separated and assigned to individual video frames and then reassembled to collapse time into a single image.

Richards has had solo exhibitions at the Thomas Robertello Gallery in Chicago and the Aqua Art Fair Miami. His work has been shown in exhibitions in New York City at P.S.1, White Columns, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, LFL Gallery, the International Print Center, and Center for Book Arts, among others.

The paintings of Peter Williams have been described by artist and writer William Eckhardt Kohler as “in no particular order: hallucinogenic, acerbic, pained, beautiful, confessional, obsessive, critical, jarring, wild, weird and profoundly human. They are born from Williams’ experiences of race, appetite, and physical vulnerability. The visual lexicon is a heady blend of psychedelic color, abstract pattern, and cartoon-manic imagery.”

Most recently Williams has had solo exhibitions with Foxy Productions in New York City and Paul Kotula Projects in Detroit. Recipient of numerous grants, including a Joan Mitchell Award, his work was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennale and is in the permanent collection of the Detroit Institute of Art.

Curator Sid Sachs (University of the Arts, Philadelphia) writes that the color in Robert Straight’s paintings “possesses a synesthesia, like computer screens burned in and blown out, unnatural, uncommon, the stuff that dyes are dreamed of. Straight’s space is warped and transparent, but more than that, as you scan the space, violet can turn from figure to ground, from positive to negative.”

Over the past three years Straight has had solo exhibitions at Schmidt/Dean Gallery in Philadelphia, the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art in Wilmington, and the Philadelphia International Airport. His work is in the permanent collections of numerous public and private institutions, including the Delaware Art Museum and the Cranbrook Art Museum.